It is already 95 degrees F and about 85% humidity. Rain fell just 400 feet from the window where I sit with a cold ice tea.

I just read an article taking readers back in time to the supercontinent Rodinia, then the big (and my favorite) supercontinent Pangea. Then the epoch of volcanoes, and rapidly forward to the apes walking upright on the savannahs.

And I get a feeling that I’m riding a rocking horse through time, whizzing through the birth and growth of this merry-go-round.

I’m like an alien kid, loving the ride, and hugging the realization that we humans are a speck on a golf ball whirling around a lightbulb in a giant arena of wonder.

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On mountains I lose myself and become one and nothing with everything, and I see things clearly.

To know happiness, one must know pain. To know joy, one must know sadness. To welcome the day, one must know the night. To rejoice in life, one must know death.

The yin and yang is present in all life, in all non-life. It is the Way of everything. Where there is a positive, there is a negative. We cannot always choose one or the other, sometimes it chooses us. To know both helps us to choose a path. But we should not choose to deny that which we don’t want to choose. Otherwise we may fall into that path unknowingly. It is how that path chooses us.

Denial is choosing blindness, and then blindly we may tumble onto the wrong path. We live on a dynamic journey that with each step we learn and navigate by following what we think is right. That journey may twist and turn with several obstacles in the way, some with demons. But to face the demons, and conquer them, yet still acknowledging that they exist, makes us stronger and informs our choices in the Path with Heart.

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A week or so ago on FaceBook I was nominated by two friends to participate in the #challengeonnaturephotography meme. Although I rarely participate in these memes, the thought “Why not?” prompted me to give it a try. The protocol is to post a nature-themed photograph, include the hashtag, give kudos to the friend that nominated you, and then nominate another friend in the caption.

I played by the rules for three days. Then life got in the way (long days in the field), and I got lazy. I posted when I had time, dropped the official hashtag, the nominators, and ran out of FB friends to nominate. I keep my FB friends to a relatively small number (up to 50 now!), and friends who are into photography have already participated once or twice.

Now I submit a story with the photograph instead. Why? Because photography to me is a storytelling medium. Today’s photograph is a glimpse into the secret lives on the ‘little people’.

Nearly every day for three months last summer, I was privy to an entire world few of us see in depth and detail. I felt like a giant studying, learning, and enjoying a network of soil, water, plants, and insects……….at their level. Sometimes I was so giddy with childlike delight, I forgot who and what I was. And I was full of anger and intense sadness when part of this magical world was destroyed by humans. That, too, was a lesson I won’t forget.

Revealed below is a monarch butterfly larva and several cobalt blue beetles all ‘doing their thing’. They use milkweed as a common food source. Yet they tolerate each other. I have watched members of both species consume leaf material, side by side without conflict. Here, two beetles are copulating, undisturbed and unfettered. While the monarch voraciously chows down, preparing to form its chrysalis. This, however, is only one tiny window into the lives that live in the ecosystem in which I immersed myself.

Most nature photography depicts landscapes of empty agents and actors. Or portraits of animals, still and silent in pose like a person sitting for a photograph. To me this is an injustice to the inhabitants of the landscape as they live out their drama and narratives in those spaces. Few ‘nature’ photographs reveal the complex interrelationships within the landscapes and with their fellow animals. They fail to show the communities of life in places other than within our own human preconceptions and expectations. As if we strive to capture and show only a snapshot in time and space that suits what we want to see.

In addition to the beauty, the silence and solace depicted in landscape and wildlife portrait photography is a dynamic world of creatures living their lives just like we do. The drama, the beauty, the good and bad, birth and death, at every level; from micro to macro. There are stories out there that are not of our own.

And we can learn from them: About their lives, their interactions with each other and how we interact with them. We can even learn about ourselves.

Think about that the next time you are out in the natural world. Take time to observe before you press on that shutter release button. You never know what you might find.

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Tonight, live from Taos, it’s blues night on the air. The coyotes add their chorus, the moon sneaks a peek as a curved sliver, and stars twinkle their approval. Streets are quiet and ghosts from muddy plaster slither out to reenact their stories. The mountains hum and golden aspen leaves quake to the slow rhythm and moan of a blues guitar and voice. While the heat recedes and the cool air slides down in its place.

Yeah, this is the place. My place to be.

Urn in shadows and four centuries of adobe.

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My first lessons in the ‘field’ were before I was taught any biology, physiology, ecology, any -ology. An old trapper/tracker in Maine was my human mentor. He was short on words and usually answered my questions with another question. Or a quick shrug of his shoulders. He spoke more with his eyes than he did his mouth.

When I asked him to teach me this or that, he swept his arm and hand out at everything before us and said, “That’s your teacher. I’m just an old man.”

It was almost a year before I started to realize what he meant. It came to me during the fall when a secret signal tells the maple trees to start turning orange and red. And when hair on several of the small mammals begin to change color. Leaves on many annual and perennial plants turn yellow, shrivel and fall off while seeds mature and catch a ride on the winds or by clinging to your pant cuffs and socks.

It becomes harder to walk quietly in the forests on dried leaves and twigs that crunch and snap. You learn to step on tree roots and rocks thrusting above the litter. You might glimpse a deer walking in the forest and see how they slowly place a hoof on mossy spots or bare places in between the leafy carpet. Instead of pushing your way through branches, you twist half your body sideways or bend to move in the spaces in between.

During winter you might find animal tracks in other animal tracks. Or in your tracks. Blazing new trails costs energy; go where someone else has moved the snow. Perhaps you’ll remember to follow the game trails after the snow has melted.

It was a year before I could sit, or lean against a tree or boulder, and not think. I learned to watch and observe; save the thinking for later. I learned to be still. The more still I was, the more silently I moved. The more I didn’t think, the more I learned. With the dismissal of expectations and preconceptions, the more aware and attentive I was. Actually, I became less, and more like my surroundings.

And everything spoke to me. Not in words, but in just being. My environment was my final mentor.

French philosopher Simone Weil wrote:

Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of that though, but on a lower level and not in contact with, the diverse knowledge we have acquired, which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain, who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.

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